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Horizon League commissioner called scholarships 'salary'

OAKLAND – A newly unsealed portion of documents based in part on a depositions taken from Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone in an anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA and two co-defendants show that

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Horizon League commissioner called scholarships 'salary'

Steve Berkowitz, USA TODAY Sports
3:19 p.m. EDT June 20, 2013

Valparaiso guard/forward Ryan Broekhoff (45) goes for a layup around Detroit forward/center LaMarcus Lowe (20) during the first half of a Horizon League game in January. The league's commissioner, in depositions related to the O'Bannon name and likeness suit against the NCAA et al., equated college athletic scholarships with "some sort of salary."(Photo: Andrew Weber, USA TODAY Sports)

OAKLAND – A newly unsealed portion of documents based in part on a depositions taken from Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone in an anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA and two co-defendants show that LeCrone referred to athletic scholarships as "some sort of salary."

The new information became in public Thursday -- the day a federal judge is scheduled to hold a hearing on whether to certify the case as a class action. It involved documents that originally were filed in a redacted form June 6. The redactions were lifted under a magistrate judge's ruling Monday that gave the plaintiffs four days to re-file the documents.

At issue in the case is whether college athletes' names, likenesses and images have been used illegally by the NCAA, video-game maker Electronic Arts and the nation's leading collegiate trademark licensing and marketing firm, Collegiate Licensing Co.

According to except of the transcript of LeCrone's deposition, after establishing with LeCrone that Horizon League schools offer athletics scholarships, LeCrone was asked: "So in effect, the members of the Horizon League are paying student-athletes to play a sport, correct?"

LeCrone replied: "They are offering a grant (in) aid. I don't -- I suppose you could translate that into some sort of salary. But they are providing a benefit to the student-athletes certainly to participate in sports, just as happens in the music department, in the chemistry department, and other aspects of the university."

In the legal argument they filed based on the depositions, the plaintiffs' lawyers wrote: "Of course, if (student-athletes) are viewed as employees getting 'some sort of salary' to play sports, it is completely illogical to deny them compensation for use of their" names, images and likenesses.

In March, lawyers for the defendants filed a set of written statements from LeCrone and other conference and university executives.

In slightly varied ways, those statements said the financial and legal burdens that schools would face from needing to share revenue with Bowl Subdivision football players and Division I men's basketball players -- as proposed in the lawsuit -- would prompt schools to exit Division I or Bowl Subdivision football.

Such assertions are part of the legal maneuvering connected to whether the case should be certified as a class action. If the case is certified as a class action, it likely would bring thousands of current and former college football and men's basketball players into the case and potentially place billions of dollars in damages at stake.

At issue in the case overall is whether the defendants have illegally used the names and likenesses of college football and men's basketball players. Initially filed in May 2009, its named plaintiffs include former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon.

The plaintiffs allege that the defendants violated antitrust law by conspiring to fix at zero the amount of compensation athletes can receive for the use of their names, images and likenesses in products or media while they are in school and by requiring athletes to sign forms under which they allegedly relinquish in perpetuity all rights pertaining to the use of the names, images and likenesses in ways including TV contracts, rebroadcasts of games, and video game, jersey and other apparel sales.

In seeking certification of their suit as a class action, the plaintiffs' lawyers said that while they are seeking monetary damages on behalf of former athletes, they "do not seek compensation to be paid to current student-athletes while they maintain their eligibility" but rather a system under which "monies generated by the licensing and sale of class members' names, images and likenesses can be temporarily held in trust" until their end of their college playing careers.

If, as LeCrone and other college officials asserted in March, some schools would leave Division I or FBS rather than sharing revenues with the athletes, then some athletes potentially would be better off if the current system was left unchanged. And thus, the defendants' lawyers argued in March, class certification should not be granted.

But lawyers for the plaintiffs then asked for, and received, permission from the court to conduct depositions of several of the college officials for whom statements were submitted: LeCrone, Fresno State president John Welty, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany and NCAA vice president of championships and alliances Mark Lewis. The details of Delany's deposition already have been filed publicly.